Jim Bright

• PhD
• Director of Research and Impact at Become Education

The experience of limitation in human experience including career development is inevitable but it should not thwart creativity but instead focus it more intensely. From a chaos theory perspective, limitations challenge us to live our lives creatively, meaningfully and courageously.

INTRODUCTION One of the enduring issues in the history of assessment in psychology is that of the idiographic-nomothetic debate articulated by Allport (1937). The issue became symptomatic of differences in approach by psychologists to the study of human behaviour and in particular personality. An idiographic approach places emphasis on the individu...

In this chapter we first will argue that limitations need to be acknowledged simply as part of human experience and that if properly conceptualized, they will assist both career counselors and their clients, to a deeper appreciation of reality and to more effective ways of successfully negotiating it. Next the nature of limitation will be examined...

In this chapter we first will argue that limitations need to be acknowledged simply as part of human experience and that if properly conceptualized, they will assist both career counselors and their clients, to a deeper appreciation of reality and to more effective ways of successfully negotiating it. Next the nature of limitation will be examined...

This chapter introduces the Chaos Theory of Careers (Pryor & Bright, 2003b, 2011) as applied to organizational behavior. The authors argue that organizations and the people within them can be usefully thought of as complex dynamical open systems – or strange attractors. From this perspective, organizational behavior can be understood in chaos terms...

Arguments about online delivery of career development are too frequently couched in polarising terms setting traditional face-to-face guidance practice against online systems. The focus has been on the alleged dehumanising impact of technology and the speed, economy and efficiency of online systems. The possible synergies delivered by the appropria...

The developments in the Chaos Theory of Careers (CTC) are outlined for the last decade since the publication of the original formulation in this journal in 2003 (Pryor & Bright, 2003a). The history of the development of the CTC and the major theoretical constructs of the theory including context, complexity, change, chance, attractors, emergent pat...

A key postulate of the Chaos Theory of Careers is the significant influence of change, in general, and unplanned change, in particular, on individuals’ career development. This qualitative research study investigated the perceived incident and impact of such change in the career paths of 55 high school graduates from the same class. Using a combina...

The present study used a longitudinal design to examine the relationship between openness to experience and 4‐year job performance trajectories for a sample of 129 newly employed professionals. For the typical person, performance increases decelerated over time, plateaued at 2.93 years, and then started to decline thereafter. Openness was not signi...

This chapter introduces the Chaos Theory of Careers (Pryor & Bright, 2003b, 2011) as applied to organizational behavior. The authors argue that organizations and the people within them can be usefully thought of as complex dynamical open systems - or strange attractors. From this perspective, organizational behavior can be understood in chaos terms...

This chapter introduces the Chaos Theory of Careers (Pryor & Bright, 2003b, 2011) as applied to organizational behavior. The authors argue that organizations and the people within them can be usefully thought of as complex dynamical open systems – or strange attractors. From this perspective, organizational behavior can be understood in chaos terms...

This article provides reflections on a liberal Catholic School that was described as becoming a “powerhouse of educational innovation and success”. In particular it refers to the personal experiences of the author attending that school in the late 1970s and the educational philosophy of the school described by the Principal in his book Educating th...

Failing is a neglected topic in career development theory and counselling practice. Most theories see failing as simply the opposite of success and something to be avoided. It is contended that the Chaos Theory of Careers with its emphasis on complexity, uncertainty and consequent human imitations, provides a conceptually coherent account of failur...

Approaches to career education in schools continue to be dominated by a focus on school to work or further or higher education transition planning. It is argued that as a consequence of this, the emphasis is on identifying relatively stable and singular vocational goals or outcomes. Furthermore the theories, techniques and models that support this...

The present study explored the current competency status of New Zealand residential mental health support workers (n = 121). Competency was assessed through the domains of skills, attitudes and perception of the work environment. Consistent with a recovery model, the National Mental Health Workforce Development Coordinating Committee (1999) put for...

The Chaos Theory of Careers outlines the application of chaos theory to the field of career development. It draws together and extends the work that the authors have been doing over the last 8 to 10 years.

The present study investigated differential relationships, nonlinear relationships, and multiplicative relationships among the subdimensions of extraversion (agency and affiliation) and job performance (getting ahead and getting along) for a sample of 179 managers. We found that: (i) agency was positively related to getting ahead performance, where...

The current study provides an exposition of artificial neural network (ANN) methodology in the context of research on personality and work performance. We demonstrate some of the benefits and limitations of this methodology relative to multiple regression (MR) for conducting exploratory research. Using three data sets that each contained personalit...

The significance of both higher education and career counselling is outlined. The predominant matching paradigm for career development service delivery is described. Its implications for reinforcing the status quo in the South African community are identified and questioned. The Chaos Theory of Careers (CTC) is suggested as an alternative theoretic...

This article reports three studies on the nature and impact of chance events. The first study investigated chance events in terms of the dimensions of influence and control. The second and third studies investigated the effects of multiplicity of chance events on career development are in terms of respondents’ own careers and then in terms of caree...

The potential of game as a career metaphor for use in counselling is explored and it is argued that it has been largely overlooked in the literature to date. This metaphor is then explicitly linked with the Chaos Theory of Careers (CTC), by showing how the notion of attractors within the CTC can be illustrated effectively using games metaphors. Gam...

This paper presents the implications of the Chaos Theory of Careers for career counselling in the form of Shiftwork. Shiftwork represents an expanded paradigm of career counselling based on complexity, change and uncertainty. Eleven paradigm shifts for careers counselling are outlined to incorporate into contemporary practice pattern making, an emp...

The chaos theory of careers emphasizes both stability and change in its account of career development. This article outlines counseling strategies derived from this emphasis in terms of convergent or probability thinking and emergent or possibility thinking. These 2 perspectives are characterized, and practical counseling strategy implications are...

Career landscapes are changing, work and the meaning of work is changing. We are all changing, in fact change is inevitable except from a vending machine. Uncertainty and insecurity historically have always been a part of work for most workers, yet in the 20 th century we became attached to the goals of predictability and stability in work and care...

This paper seeks to extend previous work on narrative career counselling by considering the role of plot within clients' narratives. Seven archetypal narratives derived from the work of Booker (2004) are introduced that represent systems of meaning to provide insight into how individuals interpret their experience. These plots can be understood wit...

This article presents the Chaos Theory of Careers with particular reference to the concepts of “attraction” and “attractors”. Attractors are defined in terms of characteristic trajectories, feedback mechanisms, end states, ordered boundedness, reality visions and equilibrium and fluctuation. The identified types of attractors (point, pendulum, toru...

This paper describes a longitudinal study exploring the relationship between career decision status and work outcomes (i.e. job satisfaction, organizational commitment and performance) in a group of newly appointed graduates. Graduates employed into similar roles in a large Multinational Consultancy were tracked over 12 months at three time interva...

This article outlines the current state of counseling psychology in Australia in terms of its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Strengths identified include a vibrant field of professional activity, a wide range of activities, increasing levels of public acceptance, successful peer-reviewed journals, and significant research activi...

The Chaos Theory of Careers (CTC) was developed at the turn of the Millenium to address complexity, change and chance in career development. Extant theories of careers had largely ignored these factors or merely acknowledged their presence with scant insight into their operation, organization and opportunities they present. Almost all other theorie...

Simple matching models of decision making are no longer sufficient as a basis for career counselling and education. The challenge for contemporary careers advisers is how to communicate some of the complexities of modern career development to their students; in particular, the apparently contradictory relationship between the need for planning and...

The chaos theory of careers draws together a number of themes in current theory and research. This article applies some of these themes to career counseling. The chaos theory of careers is outlined, and a conceptual framework for understanding assessment and counseling issues that focuses on convergent and emergent qualities is presented. Three pra...

Chaos career counseling, based on the Chaos Theory of Careers (R. G. L. Pryor & J. E. H. Bright, 2003a, 2003b), was compared with trait matching career counseling and a wait list control. Sixty university students who attended the Careers Research and Assessment Service seeking career advice were randomly assigned to the chaos intervention, the tra...

This study examined the efficacy of video-based chaos counselling of university students. In this study, 42 university students watched a video that presented student case studies emphasising chaotic concepts. Career decision-making measures and measures of stress were taken one week prior, immediately after and one week after the video presentatio...

Two studies are reported that investigate the role of chance events as influences in career decision making. In study one, the results of a large-scale survey of high-school and university students (N = 772) investigating influences on their career decision making are presented. Chance events were reported as influencing the career decisions of 69....

The purpose of this article is to set out the key elements of the Chaos Theory of Careers. The complexity of influences on career development presents a significant challenge to traditional predictive models of career counseling. Chaos theory can provide a more appropriate description of career behavior, and the theory can be applied with clients i...

The purpose of this article is to set out the key elements of the Chaos Theory of Careers. The complexity of influences on career development presents a significant challenge to traditional predictive models of career counseling. Chaos theory can provide a more appropriate description of career behavior, and the theory can be applied with clients i...

The chaos theory of careers emphasises continual change, the centrality and importance of chance events, the potential of minor events to have disproportionately large impacts on subsequent events, and the capacity for dramatic phase shifts in career behaviour This approach challenges traditional approaches to career counselling, assumptions about...

The role of contextual and unplanned factors on career decision-making was explored. Six hundred and fifty one university students at all levels were surveyed to collect data on career intentions, current enrolments, perceptions of influence of family, friends, teachers and the media, the role of serendipitous events and the education and current w...

This paper highlights five challenges to the accepted wisdom in career development theory and practice. It presents the chaos theory of careers and argues that the chaos theory provides a more complete and authentic account of human behaviour. The paper argues that positivism, reductionism and assumptions of linearity are inappropriate for capturin...

A study is reported that investigates the relationship between career decision status, quantity and quality of work experience obtained by university students. Career decision status is the term used to capture an individual's level of decidedness and comfort with their career decisions and the reasons underlying this state (Jones & Lohmann, 1998)....

The Chaos Theory of Careers (CTC; Pryor & Bright, 2011) construes both individuals and the contexts in which they develop their careers in terms of complex dynamical systems. Such systems perpetually operate under influences of stability and change both internally and in relation to each other. The CTC introduces new concepts to account for previou...

A chaos theory of career choice and development is outlined. Traditional trait–factor theories of career choice and development overlook too many pertinent influences on career decision-making, such as change and chance events. As a consequence these reductionist approaches fail to adequately capture some of the most salient influences on an indivi...

R.F. Bornstein (1994) questioned whether subliminal mere exposure effects might generalize to structurally related stimuli, thereby providing evidence for the existence of implicit learning. Two experiments examined this claim using letter string stimuli constructed according to the rules of an artificial grammar. Experiment 1 demonstrated that bri...

The impact of undergraduate level, age, volume and pattern of work experience on career decision status was investigated. A sample of 804 first year students and 353 third year students completed measures of career decision status and work experience including amount and pattern of work experience (i.e., full-time, part-time or casual), number of d...

Four experiments examined the claim that cross-format transfer in invariant learning is reliant solely on the presence of repetition structure in study and test strings (Stadler, Warren, & Lesch, 2000). Experiments 1, 2, and 3 used strings with no repetitions and found significant cross-format transfer in combination with a non-significant transfer...

Three experiments are reported that examine the nature of knowledge under-lying performance in the invariant learning task. Previous research (Bright & Burton, 1994; McGeorge & Burton, 1990) has supported an account of perfor-mance based on the implicit abstraction and application of a rule pertaining to the invariant feature. In contrast, we found...

Three experiments are reported that investigate the relationship between the structural mere exposure effect (SMEE) and implicit learning in an artificial grammar task. Subjects were presented with stimuli generated from a finite-state grammar and were asked to memorize them. In a subsequent test phase subjects were required first to rate how much...

This paper reports three studies of occupational stress investigating the role of social support as an intervening variable in the Job Strain Model (Karasek, 1979). A computer simulated mail-sorting work environment was used to assess the effect of demands, control and social support on measures of strain, satisfaction, and perceived and actual tas...

Sixty-two managers and human resource consultants rated a series of genuine résumés with covering letters. The résumés were manipulated to contain varying amounts of information about the candidate’s knowledge, skills and abilities (competency statements). This information appeared at different locations in the résumé and covering letter. In additi...

Three experimental studies showed that bonuses based on end-of-period determinations of standards led to the setting of more challenging goals but lower performance than a control condition in which bonuses were based on the achievement of self-set goals. Performance differences between the bonus and control conditions were not mediated by levels o...

Three experimental studies showed that bonuses based on end-of-period determinations of standards led to the setting of more challenging goals but lower performance than a control condition in which bonuses were based on the achievement of self-set goals. Performance differences between the bonus and control conditions were not mediated by levels o...

This study tests a 3-factor model of occupational stress, which predicts that job demands, job control and social support influence levels of strain. In a laboratory simulation of mail sorting, task demands, control and social supports were manipulated systematically. Pre- and post-task measures of self reported stress and arousal were compared acr...

One of the most common dilemmas for candidates preparing résumés is to decide how to present periods in their work history when they were not actively engaged in the workforce. Content analysis of seven of the most popular résumé guides available in Australia indicates that opinion differs regarding how to deal with gaps in work history. Results fr...

This paper summarises the findings of an earlier study by Bright, Earl and Adams (1997) which looked at the impact of competency statements and intent statements included on resumes. In addition we present further analysis of the original data not previously reported which provides valuable insights into the screening processes employed by human re...

Karesek's demand–control model has been extremely influential and is widely used to predict a range of health outcomes, yet there have been comparatively few intervention studies and relatively little evidence of its impact on the design of work to improve health. This article discusses the tension between meeting the need for a model of psychosoci...

Masters (1992) argued that an implicitly acquired motor skill is less likely to fail under pressure than an explicitly acquired skill. He demonstrated this by showing that induced anxiety led to differences in the golf putting performance of groups who had acquired the skill implicitly and explicitly. We replicated Masters' basic findings but our r...

Bright and Burton (1994) demonstrated that, when subjects are shown a series of clocks in an incidental learning task, they become sensitive to regularities within these stimuli. If clocks consistently show times between 06:00 and 12:00, subjects show a later selection preference for new clocks conforming to the same constraints. Furthermore, the e...

This book describes the fascinating learning, memory, and performance processes that take place without the subject's ‘explicit’ awareness. A well-known example is patients under anaesthetic who, without being able to verbally recall the surgeons' conversation, show some retention of the conversation. How much of what we ‘know’ has been learned imp...

Four experiments are reported which examine the nature of representations underlying an implicit learning task. When shown a series of clock faces, each bearing a time between 6 and 12 o'clock, subjects subsequently show a selection preference for novel clock faces between these times. Furthermore, they show no signs of being aware of the underlyin...

This paper describes an experiment undertaken to assess drivers' responses to in-vehicle information systems. This experiment was devised and carried out as part of the EUR0NETT project, within the framework of the DRIVE programme. EUR0NETT plays a key role in DRIVE, addressing crucial issues concerning behavioural responses to the introduction of...

Three experiments are reported in which tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTSs) were induced in subjects by reading them pieces of item-specific information. In Experiments 1 and 2, subjects attempted to name famous people. These experiments showed that, in a TOTS, seeing a picture of the face of the target person did not facilitate naming, whereas the in...